Whispers of how the internet of things will transform society have been floating around in the ether for years. But the real power of interconnectivity has been hung up on inflexible network infrastructure. Now network functions virtualization offers the flexibility for edge deployment, and 5G has finally hit the streets. Is the IoT about to come out of our dreams and into our lives?

“The focus now is on how we continue to bring those cloud technologies, a lot of things that have matured in the data center, further and further down in a lot of cases to the edge … and enable new IoT services and IoT applications to be fulfilled and to be delivered,” said John Healy (pictured), vice president and general manager of the datacenter network solutions group as Intel.

Healy spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed what is required for the IoT to go mainstream, the release of RHEL 8, and the collaboration between Intel and Red Hat (see the full interview with transcript here.) (* Disclosure below.)

‘The future is open hybrid implementations’

Moving from working on network functions virtualization in the network trenches to his new role as head of Intel’s IoT group isn’t as much of a disconnect as it appears. “It’s almost like I’m going to the other end of the wire,” said Healy, describing how IoT is a force shaping datacenter network solutions. “All of the applications and the services we were focused on were very much IoT-centric. Enabling new markets, enabling customers to do things when they connected to their different devices in ways they couldn’t have done before.”

The foundation underpinning both is “the continued proliferation of distributed computing,” according to Healy. “The future is open hybrid implementations; hybrid cloud, multicloud. We’re now moving into the realm of more and more IoT applications, whether it’s in industrial environments, in healthcare environments, in retail, and automotive, across the different landscapes.”

While the basic premise for technology might be the same across diverse environments, how it is implemented is very different. Understanding the needs of the environment is critical to ensure a match between problem and solution, Healy added.

Solving the IoT conundrum means working out how to enable advanced intelligence and insight from the constant in flow of data, and then relaying new services and new capabilities on top of that. Monetization will come swiftly.

“You start applying [those solutions] to all of the different markets, and there’s almost no market that you could conceive that can’t take advantage of that,” Healy said.

5G is the fundamental game changer, potentially solving the problem of maintaining connectivity between billions of devices and end points scattered over huge areas. “5G is a path to significantly accelerating what we have always envisioned as being the internet of things. And, as a result of it, new services — and you get new service categories — will be enabled … that were [previously] not efficient or affordable,” Healy stated.

Healy provided one possible example of 5G in action: In an Amber alert, finding a specific vehicle is critical to rescuing an abducted child. Current systems are “a pretty manual process,” according to Healy. Text alerts are sent to phones in the area and flashed on overhead displays on freeways. But remembering the vehicle description and looking out for it is down to each individual driver.

“Just consider the possibilities with cars using their own vision,” Healy said. “All of the cameras on all of the cars now become actively watching for license plates … then all of the connected nodes across the city become points for exchange of data to and from the different cars as they’re passing by, and all of that infrastructure is enabled by 5G.”

Red Hat and Intel have a “tight collaboration”

The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was announced on the first day of Red Hat Summit 2019. Built to enable scalable workloads in hybrid environments — from bare-metal servers to public cloud — the operating system is billed as “an intelligent OS” that will “turn a sprawling ecosystem into a true hybrid environment.”

Intel and Red Hat Inc. have a long-term partnership, and Healy credits the relationship for creating a durable base from which to build and take advantage of innovative technologies.

“Over the years, we’ve really shared a common vision about what we believe the industry should be capable of achieving,” he said. “[We] do the work upstream in advance of [new innovations] so that the community is enabled and capable of supporting them.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE